


Mistress of Death

by Evenatango



Category: Strange the Dreamer Series - Laini Taylor
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Post-Canon, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:15:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26414785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evenatango/pseuds/Evenatango
Summary: A terrible accident aboard the Astral results in one and a half deaths and changes everything.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an exploration of a concept I have been thinking about but will probably never incorporate into a longer story, so thought I'd post as a shortie 2 chapter fic just to get it out there. I've never written for this fandom before, so let me know what you think?

It was an accident. Just a stupid, ordinary accident of the kind that happened a dozen times a day on a ship filled with traumatised and magically volatile Mesarthim with questionable control over their powers. Until now injuries had been minor – a few bruises, cuts, one time a fractured wrist, nothing that Sparrow couldn’t put right with a minute or so of her growth magic.

  
But this time was different.

  
The first most of them knew of it was a loud thump, followed by a scream and then sudden, terrible silence.

  
They came running from across the ship – first Tzara and Calixte, skidding into the main living area half clothed and clutching blankets around themselves, though clearly not emerging from sleep; then Ruza and Thyon, in a similar state, but both blushing a deep crimson. Ruby, Lazlo, Sarai, Feral and Kiska, a few of the rescued god spawn, everyone close enough to hear the scream. They all came running, and then stopped, almost as one.

  
It was Minya.

  
Minya, who had held an army in her fist since she was six years old, who had been willing to tear a city apart with her bare hands just to save them. Minya, who had at last started to grow and trust and even, occasionally, not to flip the quell board when she won.

  
Minya was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor, terribly, unnaturally still.

  
Mika, their most recently rescued brother, was kneeling over her prone form, his face chalky pale and stained with tears.

  
‘I didn’t mean to. I was dreaming. She woke me and I- I didn’t mean to, it just happened’.

  
Mika’s power was throwing shockwaves. When he was focusing hard, they were enough to knock half an army off their feet with a single pulse, and those nearest to him would find themselves hurled thirty feet or more, often to perish on their own weapons, or those of comrades that had been thrown with them. This had not been such a pulse. He had been startled from a nightmare and reacted instinctively, the way a normal human might slap away a hand that shook them awake. But Mika was god spawn, and even a ‘slap’ from him was enough to blast the slight, childish form of Minya across the room. She had hit the unforgiving mesarthium wall behind her head first with a sickening crack.

  
Sarai, free as she was from the confines physics, was the first to reach her. Minya’s neck was cricked to the side at a harsh, unnatural angle, her dark hair damp and matted with blood.

  
‘Oh Minya...’

  
She reached out with trembling fingers to stroke the hair gently away from the girl’s face, and her fingers came away red.

  
Sarai was no medic. Her instinct was to try and move Minya to a more comfortable position, to straighten out her neck so that she could rest easier. Taking a deep breath, she reached out with both hands, ready to cradle the girl’s face and ease her head up, but the others had reached her now.

  
‘DON’T!’

  
Suheyla had seen what she was going to do and thrown out an arm to hold her back.

  
‘Don’t touch her. I think that neck’s broken. It we move her now, it’ll kill her. Somebody fetch Sparrow!’

  
Even as Calixte, Tzara, Thyon and Ruza ran in different directions to look for her, Sarai could feel that she would be too late. If Rook were here it might be possible – he could seal Minya in a bubble of time and hold her safe until Sparrow arrived to regrow what had been broken in her. But Rook, Werran and Feral were out in the nearest town, buying supplies to take them through the next leg of their journey, and wouldn’t be back for hours yet.

  
Minya was still warm, still breathing, if shallowly. But Sarai could feel what no one else could. The cold, dissolving feeling of unmaking was pulling at her already as Minya’s hold on her slackened. It was barely there, the finest filament holding her to the world, and then...

  
Sparrow arrived at a run, breathless and earth stained from working in the garden, just in time to see Sarai vanish from Minya’s side. Time seemed to slow, hazy and dream like as she sprinted over to them, almost knocking Suhelya to the ground and she dashed to lay hands on Minya and repair her the fragile bones and sinew that were all that stood between her life and her death.

  
Sparrow could feel the rush of life in the things she grew. Plants, animals, people, it didn’t matter. If life was there, she could nurture it, she could knit together a broken rose stem or a broken bone. Once she had even repaired the broken hearts and chests of Eril-Fane and Azareen after Nova had pierced them with the stinger of a Mesarthium wasp, bringing them back from the very brink of death. But although there injuries were grievous, they had not yet left their bodies. Sparrow could tell at once that Minya was gone, and she could not bring her back.

  
It was too late.

  
The only person that could have kept her soul, if not her body, was Minya herself. And Minya was not here to do it.

_  
It was too late._

  
A sob burst from her. Lazlo was shouting, Ruby and Suheyla crying, Mika still moaning ‘No, no, I didn’t mean to’ in a voice made hoarse with screaming. But it all sounded very far away.

  
Minya was gone. Which meant Sarai was gone too. Right now their spirits would still be nearby, but they had no way of keeping them. Soon both would evanesce, and half of her family would be irreparably torn away.

  
Sparrow looked down at Minya’s small, broken body. She had grown over their last few years on board the Astral. She looked about 11– still small, but on the cusp of leaving childhood behind at long last. Now she never would. Very gently, Sparrow reached to set Minya’s head straight. She couldn’t mend the break – her gift was tied to life, and if there was no life, her powers of regrowth were useless (she had tried mending torn fabric and cracked pottery to no avail); but she could at least let Minya’s body rest at ease, without that frightening, sickening angle to her neck. Moving her couldn’t hurt anymore. At last, she looked peaceful. She could have been sleeping, except Minya’s sleep was never peaceful. She was restless and fidgety, and still prone to nightmares, although not quite so bad as they had once been. It felt wrong, to see her so still.

  
None of them quite knew what to do next. Lazlo looked hollowed out with shock, still grasping at the air where Sarai had been as if he could reform her with his hands. The others were holding each other, or staring at her as if they still thought she might be able to make things right, and she felt their hope like a punch to the chest, because there was nothing, _nothing_ she could do.

  
Somehow she managed to raise her eyes from the poor, small body and gaze through a film of tears over the heads of her family, looking for something that only Minya would have been able to see. She could make out nothing but the ceiling, sense nothing but the others huddled around Minya’s body. But she knew they were there. Minya, and Sarai too, though not for long.

  
Sarai had told her, late one night when everyone else was long since asleep, what it had felt like after she died but before Minya caught her soul. She had described looking down at Lazlo as he cradled her body, and feeling desperately sad that he was looking at it and not her, because she was still there, unable to communicate or be seen. She had been sure she was going to evanesce alone, while the attention of those she loved was elsewhere. Now Sparrow wished she had asked more questions. Where exactly had Sarai been? Could she still hear? See? Did she stay with her body, or in the spot where she had died? At the time it would have been morbid and insensitive to ask such things, but now... Now perhaps it could have helped her to do the right thing for them.

  
Still, she would try, and hope they could hear, and that it might make them feel less afraid.

  
‘Minya. I’m so sorry. I will never stop being sorry that I wasn’t in time to save you, the way you saved me, and all of us. If I could do what you could, you’d be safe now. I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate it more when we were growing up. I love you Minya, and I’ll always love you. Thank you for being my sister.

  
Sarai. I can’t believe I’ve lost you twice. I can’t believe you’re really going this time. I’m so sorry. I love you forever. I hope you and Minya are together, and it won’t be frightening. However it works, I hope you’re still together’.

  
At first the others looked at her as if she was going mad, but one by one they seemed to realise what she was doing, and began to speak to Minya and Sarai themselves. The shock and grief would come, and it might yet break them. But they had such a small window when those they had lost were still with them, and none of them wanted to abandon them.

  
There would be time to fall apart later.


	2. Chapter 2

For Minya, death had been almost an anticlimax.

  
She had spent so much of her life steeped in other people’s deaths – waiting for them, planning them, catching their souls. Her entire gift relied on death as much as Sparrow’s relied on life.

  
And so when it came, she had expected more. A better death for one thing – a valiant battle against insurmountable odds, where even as she died she took down her enemy with her. Given her early life, she had never even considered the possibility of dying peacefully of old age. But this. A stupid accident. The kind of thing that happened every day and usually resulted in no more than a bruise and perhaps a touch of wounded pride. It was such a pointless way to die.

  
She had been angry about something. She couldn’t even remember what now (death, it turned out, could really put things in perspective). In a rage that already felt embarrassingly like a childish temper tantrum, she had slammed open the door to the main living area and stormed in, swearing and vitriolic as only she could be. Mika had been in there. They’d only picked him up yesterday, spiriting him away from a life of harsh cruelty that still clung to him, as if he couldn’t quite believe yet that this wasn’t just a trick. He had been dozing, and had startled awake at her noise, throwing out his power instinctively. He hadn’t been trying to hurt her, but she was small and slight, and standing close to him in a confined space. She had been hurled through the air like a rag doll.

  
Mika was blaming himself for his burst of accidental magic. He had crumpled in on himself, looking almost as broken as her own body did, and much to her surprise, Minya found that she was sorry.

  
She _liked_ Mika. He was a little younger than she was, having been one of the last to leave the nursery after his powers developed early, and she could remember him, just. He had been a stubborn little boy with a fondness for being tickled and a deep, abiding hatred of bath time. At three he had begun knocking the Ellens off their feet when they tried to undress him for a wash, and a few weeks later he had been taken, just like all the others. As an adult he was reserved – flinching whenever anyone spoke to him and keeping his eyes cast down, but once or twice Minya had seen a flash of the old stubbornness, and had been looking forward to seeing who he would become among friends. Now he had killed her, and she should have hated him for it, but she didn’t. It wasn’t his fault.

  
If anything, it was her own.

  
Minya knew perfectly well how easily startled the new ones were, and how hard it could be to control defensive magic when it had been all you had your whole life. She had been there. Was still there, in many ways. She knew better. But she had raged anyway, and then without warning she was sailing through the air. She had heard a horrible crack.

  
And then nothing.

  
She didn’t hear the others arrive, didn’t see or feel Sarai and Ruby holding her hands as Mika knelt above them all, sobbing the way he had when Korako carried him out the nursery as a toddler – desperately, hopelessly, as if he had never really grown up. She didn’t hear them shouting for Sparrow as they searched the ship, or see the eventually return with her. After her brief, ignominious flight she had known no more until her soul slipped free from her body minutes later to hover above them.

  
She could see herself lying in a crumpled, broken heap below, impossibly small and fragile, her eyes emptied of their usual fierce determination so that she looked like a hollow doll. Too still, too pale. Horrible, _horrible_.

  
Minya focused instead on Sparrow, who was kneeling beside her body and cradling the thing that had been her head between gentle hands, setting it straight as if she might yet put everything right. Suddenly Minya remembered how Sparrow had brought Eril-Fane back from the brink of death, and felt a surge of hope.

  
Yes! Yes, Sparrow would save her!

  
She couldn’t be dead, not really. Sparrow was going to strengthen the thread that must surely hold her to her body even now, and in a moment she would be drawn back inside and everything would be alright.

  
Any moment now.

  
Minya waited, holding breath she didn’t have as the seconds passed and nothing happened.

  
Sparrow let go of her head and looked up.

  
She looked right at Minya, though there was no way she could have seen her, and her eyes were filled with despair. It took a moment for Minya to realise that she was speaking, but when the words filtered through at last they clarified nothing.

  
Sparrow was saying sorry, and thank you, and I love you. Why was the silly girl wasting her energy talking when she should be focusing on fixing her neck?

  
‘Come _on_ Sparrow! Get on with it!’

  
But as Sparrow continued to sit and look up, the tears running into her ears as she talked on, Minya realised that she was saying goodbye.

  
‘No! No, don’t you dare give up on me, don’t you dare! I’m here! I’m right here! Bring me _back_!’

  
If she had had a foot, she would have stamped it. If she had had hands, she’d have shaken Sparrow until she came to her senses and _forced_ her magic to work. But she didn’t even have a voice, and all the words she wanted to say stayed as insubstantial as she now was – neither heard nor really there at all.

  
She felt powerless in a way she hadn’t done since her gift woke in her, only this time she wasn’t at the mercy of the Ellens, with their cold eyes and hateful words. She was at the mercy of death itself. Her own evanescence pulling at her, unravelling her bit by bit, until at last there would be nothing left.

  
One by one her still living family said their farewells to her, though she knew they could neither see nor sense her here. They sat in a sad ring around her body, all of them looking ravaged and broken, but none of them making a move to leave her. They all looked up at the ceiling and spoke on and on as the hours passed, as if they cared nothing for the discomfort they must all surely be feeling by now.

  
Were they planning to stay with her until she had evanesced completely? Surely not – it might take days, especially in the enclosed space of the ship. They would move on soon. They would leave her, completely and forever.

  
‘Don’t go… I don’t want to be alone...’

  
It was the plea of a frightened child in the dark, and it was beneath her, but she couldn’t help it. Minya didn’t want to be alone – had _never_ been truly alone, not once in her whole life...

  
But of course, she _wasn’t_ alone.

  
She had _died_ , and if _she_ died, that meant that Sarai…

  
Yes. Sarai was here too – unanchored as Minya was, her solid ghost form vanishing the moment Minya left her body. But now that she was trying to, Minya realised that she could feel the brush of Sarai’s soul against her own just as she always had, even now that she had nothing to feel _with_. She could feel Sarai’s terror, her despair as she too was unmade while those they loved cried for them below, utterly unreachable.

  
The feel of it seemed to slap the shocked, wandering part of herself back to its senses. Sarai was evenescing. _Sarai._ The wilful, frustrating girl who had defied her at every turn. The child with a mouth full of moths and a head full of the nightmares she spread among their enemies. The toddler whose slippery little hand had almost wriggled free from her own, but that she had held fast at the last.

  
Sarai, Feral, Ruby, Sparrow. The four she had been able to save. They were _hers_.

  
Rage like she hadn’t felt in years surged through her then. Not the petty temper tantrum she had been indulging in at the time of her death, but a pure scream of fury at death itself for presuming to take her and her sister against their will.

  
Minya was the one who told the dead when to go and when to stay in life. It was her _gift_.

  
Instinctively, she snatched at her own fraying soul string, just as she had snatched at so many, many others in her life. It was harder than usual. Being dead was disorienting – you had nothing to hold onto, to anchor you to the world. There was nothing to hold _with_. But Minya’s gift had never been physical. Her fistful of ghost strings was rooted in her soul, not her body, and her will was implacable.

  
It still shouldn’t have worked of course – to think it would was ridiculous. Minya was _dead._ The dead could do nothing but die.

  
But the dead had always obeyed Minya; the slightest flicker of effort enough to bring the strongest warriors to their knees. She would not be defeated now.

  
Minya felt the tendrils of herself coalescing around the central point of her fierce focus, solidifying into flesh that was not a live, but was real and tangible and hers to control . A wild laugh escaped her newly formed lips as she pulled the last of herself together, her own soul held tight in a fist she shouldn’t have had.

  
‘ _Minya!’_

  
A chorus of shocked voices greeted her return, but Minya wasted no time on explanations or greetings. As soon as she had herself held securely, she reached for Sarai.

  
She was still there – barely – but it was enough.

  
As easily as plucking a plum from a bough, Minya took hold of Sarai’s soul and brought her back into the world.


End file.
